Equity of Test Is Debated as Children Compete for Gifted Kindergarten

From left, Laisha Mendez, 5, Amaya Taylor, 4, and Kellie Pierre, 4, at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan. Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Teachers at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan tell Alexis Stewart that her 4-year-old son, Chase, is bright.

“He knows about different fish, different birds, different species,” Ms. Stewart said. “He’s on it.”

Chase took the city test for the public schools’ gifted and talented kindergarten program, but missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, she said.

Ms. Stewart, a single mom working two jobs, didn’t think the process was fair. She had heard widespread reports of wealthy families preparing their children for the kindergarten gifted test with $90 workbooks, $145-an-hour tutoring and weekend “boot camps.”

Ms. Stewart used a booklet the city provided and reviewed the 16 sample questions with Chase. “I was online trying to find sample tests,” she said. “But everything was $50 or more. I couldn’t afford that.”

She understands why wealthier families pay for test prep. “They want to help their kids,” she said. “If I could buy it, I would, too.”

Another Bloomingdale Head Start parent, Lawanna Gillespie, a medical aide who said her son Zion also missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, was surprised to hear that prep materials existed for a kindergarten test.

“There are books you can buy with sample questions?” she said. “I never knew that.”

Delores Mims, an education director at the Head Start, said, “Our parents are at a disadvantage.”

Bloomingdale, with headquarters at West 109th Street, is a highly regarded Head Start, and Ms. Mims says she has several 4-year-olds who she feels would do well in a gifted kindergarten program.

Founded as a preschool in 1960 even before the federal Head Start program was established, Bloomingdale became a national prototype. To this day, it’s considered a model, and educators worldwide visit it — recently from Iceland, Indonesia and the Netherlands.

An early 4-year-old graduate, Patrick Gaspard, who grew up to become a White House political adviser, thinks so highly of Bloomingdale that he took one of its founders, Susan Feingold, to meet President Obama.

This week, Bloomingdale marks its 50th year by graduating 100 4-year-olds, 98 percent of them black and Hispanic and all poor (to qualify, a family of three must earn less than $18,300).

Not one of the 100 will be attending one of the city’s gifted kindergarten programs in the fall, according to Bloomingdale officials.

In contrast, in 2007, Ms. Mims says, when she was a teacher, she knew of a half-dozen who were accepted. Back then, under a decentralized selection process, teacher assessment, classroom observation and interviews all played a role.

That approach was criticized as vulnerable to political manipulation and racial favoritism, since districts could take into account increasing diversity in making selections.

“The process was fractured and inconsistent, and programs were too often gifted in name only,” the city education chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an e-mail message.

In 2008, Mr. Klein made the score on a citywide standardized test the sole criteria for admission. Mr. Klein is a leading testing proponent for everything from grading schools to rating teachers, and he predicted that a citywide test would be a more equitable solution.

Since then, there have been two major developments, neither looking much more equitable than the old system. Blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten programs dropped to 27 percent this year under the test-only system, from 46 percent under the old system (66 percent of city kindergartners are black or Hispanic).

And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she’s opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month “boot camp” for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.

Last year, of 120 children she prepared for the city test, she says 80 percent scored at least 90. “Prepping makes a difference,” she said. “Prep brings anxiety down; children get used to an adult giving them the test and the format.

“A lot of middle- and upper-middle-class families rely on this,” she added.

After a big drop in enrollment the first year of the test, city officials said that better outreach last year helped them nearly double the number of blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten classes, although the percentage barely changed this year, increasing by 2 percent over 2008-9.

“We are every bit as committed as we have been, if not more so, in trying to find a way that there is proper representation among students,” Marc Sternberg, a deputy chancellor, said at a City Council meeting last month.

However, the Council said in a June report that despite the yearlong push, “six districts in central Brooklyn and the South Bronx still don’t have enough qualifying kids to open gifted kindergartens next fall.”

Mr. Sternberg said the city would soon request proposals for “a different kind of test” for 2012 “that would be harder to game in the way that so many families do, so as a result to be more likely to result in a level playing field.”

Mr. Klein added, “Our highest priority is to ensure that we continue to have a rigorous citywide test that identifies only those qualities of giftedness in children.”

But other testing experts — including Tonya Moon, a University of Virginia professor and principal investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, and Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who directed assessment for city schools from 1988 to 2001 — say there is no magic test that can’t be gamed. They say tests need to be supplemented with teacher evaluations, classroom observation and interviews.

While applauding Mr. Klein for creating a citywide standard, Mr. Tobias said the test should be just one part of the evaluation: “Tests are fallible. I don’t know a test in existence that’s not subject to test prep. You will always have results biased toward kids with better opportunity.”

The Klein administration early on tried a form for teachers to evaluate children, but abandoned it as too cumbersome to administer.

Even Ms. Doruk, whose livelihood is test prep, thinks the city is making a mistake relying only on tests. She says she’s seen many bright 4-year-olds turn to jelly on test day. “The city needs to look at the child as more than a test,” she said.

Kellyah Hayes-Bernardez, 8, who was at Bloomingdale Head Start in 2007, when teacher evaluations still played a major role, was selected for the gifted program. Her mother, Eva, a kitchen worker, says Kellyah, now in third grade, has thrived at Public School 145’s gifted program. “It pushes her to her fullest potential,” Kellyah’s mother said. “One day she came home talking about, who’s that artist, Monet?”

Marilyn Barnwell, who has worked 30 years at Bloomingdale, says: “The old system included us. We knew the children; we were in their environment every day. We saw potential and curiosity of learning. Now we’re just scorekeepers for the test.”

Ms. Stewart, who arrives from her supermarket job at 5:45 p.m. to pick up Chase, believes that test prep is a new form of discrimination, “not by race, by social class.”

“Discouraged? Of course. It’s awful, but I don’t give up,” she said. Then she walked Chase to the home of his grandparents, who watch him while she works her night job as an usher at the Broadway show “Memphis.”

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2010, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Equity of Test Is Debated As Children Compete For Gifted Kindergarten. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe